When people think about security debt, the first image that comes to mind is a data breach — a visible, headline-grabbing event that sends teams into chaos. Systems go down, customers lose access, regulators investigate, and the brand takes a hit that lasts for years.
Take for instance the recent cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover in August 2025 — it is estimated to have cost the UK economy approximately £1.9 billion (≈ US$2.5 billion) and impacted thousands of organisations.
That’s the visible cost of security debt — when the vulnerabilities you’ve ignored finally come due.
But the truth is, most of the financial damage happens long before the first exploit.
If you’ve read our previous article — Security Debt: The Invisible Threat Growing in Your Codebase — you know that every un-patched vulnerability, every outdated dependency, and every ignored scanner alert contributes to a growing backlog of risk.
This accumulation doesn’t just increase your attack surface — it quietly erodes your ability to grow, sell, and deliver.
Let’s look at where that erosion happens.
The Hidden Cost: Missed Business Opportunities
The irony of security debt is that it hurts your business even when nothing happens.
You can be breach-free and still lose deals, delay contracts, or miss out on entire markets — all because of the silent drag of unresolved vulnerabilities.
The deal-breaker during customer audits
Enterprise buyers have grown much stricter.
Before signing a deal, they now expect proof that their vendors won’t introduce risk into their environment.
That means security questionnaires, audits, and sometimes full penetration tests.
And that’s where the debt shows up.
When dozens — or hundreds — of open vulnerabilities appear in your reports, it raises instant red-flags.
You lose control of the timeline: remediation is now dictated by the client, not by your roadmap.
Contracts stall for months. Sales teams wait. Engineering teams drop everything to fix issues that should have been addressed earlier.
In many cases, the deal simply dies — not because your product isn’t good, but because your security posture doesn’t inspire confidence.
According to research, 67% of companies admit they’ve lost business deals because potential clients lacked confidence in their security strategy.
Compliance and SLA penalties
For many software vendors, the business impact is written directly into the contract.
Most enterprise agreements now include security SLAs — for example, patching all critical vulnerabilities within 30 days.
Miss that deadline, and you could face financial penalties, withheld payments, or even contract termination.
Beyond that, there’s the growing weight of regulatory compliance.
Failing to meet standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIS 2 or HIPAA doesn’t just carry reputational risk — it closes doors.
You can’t enter regulated industries, you can’t respond to RFPs, and you can’t compete for strategic customers who require certification.
Every missed audit window or compliance renewal represents real revenue lost to inaction.
The erosion of trust
Trust is a hard currency in B2B.
Buyers, investors, and even employees now evaluate a company’s security maturity as part of due diligence.
When they see a backlog of unaddressed vulnerabilities, it creates a perception of poor governance and lack of control.
Even without a breach, this perception is enough to slow deals, reduce contract size, or disqualify you from partnerships.
And once trust is shaken, it takes years — not quarters — to rebuild.
“Security debt doesn’t just increase your attack surface — it reduces your market surface.”
The Hidden Cost : The Compounding Financial Drain
The second dimension of security debt isn’t external — it’s internal.
It’s the slow, compounding drain on productivity, focus, and team morale that quietly inflates your operating costs.
The productivity tax
As the backlog of vulnerabilities grows, developers spend more time firefighting than building.
Fixing old vulnerabilities means diving into legacy code, deciphering someone else’s logic, and testing patches that might break something else.
Meanwhile, security teams drown in noise — triaging thousands of scanner alerts that provide little business-context. Because the backlog is large: they must assess which ones matter, figure out which modules are still live, track down which devs own that code — and then often fix issues that may not even be high-impact in their context.
In short: an hour devoted to security is far less productive when the debt is high.
More triage, more investigation, more rework — fewer delivered features, slower sprints, frustrated teams.
The cost of remediating unclear, outdated or mis-prioritized issues is high, and it diverts focus from innovation and growth.
The compounding cost curve
Like financial debt, the longer you postpone, the more expensive it becomes.
- Lost context = longer remediation time
- Code drift = higher regression risk
- Larger patch sets = more QA overhead
Studies consistently show that fixing a vulnerability post-release costs 5-10× more than addressing it during development.
For example, typical penetration tests for standard web or application environments now range from around US$5 000 to US$40 000+, with more complex scopes and enterprises going well above US$50 000.
And for bug bounty campaigns: while payouts for individual bugs may average around US$1 000 to US$3 700, a public platform analysis found that the cost of a vulnerability exploited in the wild is approximately US$4.88 million, nearly 4 500× the cost of the payout.
One CISO we spoke with estimated that for organisations with high security debt, simply launching a bug-bounty campaign begins at around €40 000 entry-fee-level — before any remediation costs are counted.
When reputational damage enters the equation, the multiplier jumps even higher — deals dry up, valuations shrink, and your cost of doing business escalates.
Security debt doesn’t only slow you down — it silently inflates your cost of doing business.
Conclusion: From Hidden Liability to Business Enabler
The first step isn’t to fix everything — it’s to make the debt visible and understand what truly matters to your business.
Not every vulnerability is equal. Some will never be exploited; others are deal-breakers waiting to happen.
By prioritizing based on business impact, you shift from reactive firefighting to proactive enablement.
Paying down your security debt isn’t just a defensive move — it’s a growth strategy:
✅ Faster audits
✅ Smoother sales cycles
✅ Higher customer trust
✅ Stronger valuations
At Glev, we help software vendors uncover, measure, and prioritise their security debt — so they can protect both their code and their pipeline.
💬 Curious what your security debt is really costing you? Let’s find out together.
